The Plot Against America

Roth does this thing in The Plot Against America where instead of building up to a major dramatic climax where everything hits the fan at once and turns into holy-shit-chaos like in American Pastoral, he rather casually introduces startling little facts and effects upfront and explains them later which results in tiny little chaos slaps in the face.  Something along the lines of "I snuck out of my house to become an orphan and everything really turned out fine and I don't even remember getting kicked by that horse and why I'm now hooked up to a tube"...which then goes on to explain how he came upon a horse and why it decided to kick him in the head.  In better words, of course.  The overall story though, is a what-if-Lindy-had-been-president-instead-of-FDR fictionalized history told through the accounts of Philip Roth as a young boy in New Jersey.  This means that America grows to be an anti-semitic nation led by a supposed supporter of Hitler.  I've never really read/seen anything about America's involvement with WWII prior to Pearl Harbor, so this was an interesting place to start.

I'm really impressed by the way Philip Roth can complexly think things through and write in such a detailed manner pertaining to various characters, and how things affect one another.  I'm a simpleton so I'm unable to conceptualize one person's actions and motives and how they will build into a bunch of other events and thus my stories are flatter than this rich faux history that Roth has created.  It's believable, exciting, and personal, and you get the sense that you're actually learning something about history even though it's not what really happened (although, you can get a quick taste of the learning bit of real events from the postscript).  As I've mentioned before, I've often found that Jewish writers are exceptional at capturing emotion beautifully (whether it's Nazi-related or not), and by using his own family as the centerpiece of the story, Roth has written a sort of upside-down fairy tale of his own life that is relatable.

All this WWII reading led me to other movies and online reading and now I'm kind of paranoid, though I'm not sure of what.  Also, I didn't know Henry Ford was such an anti-semite.  What an asshole.

Going to Boston next weeeeeeek!  Dear god, let someone freaking hire me soon because this job hunt thing is really getting expensive.

I'm glad Kafka let this one go

I have so far found for myself that Franz Kafla's writing doesn't suit me.  He is rather melancholy and depressing, which you would think would be right up my alley, but he does it in such a queer way that is impersonal and difficult to relate to.  

The Trial is an unfinished novel, so that probably accounts for all of the loose ends in this story (such as the female neighbor that K. stalks for a chapter or so and then immediately forgets).  The topic of this novel is an accused man who is "arrested" for no apparent cause.  Naturally, you would assume that with that sort of "problem", the point of the plot would be to reveal what the accused had done.  On the contrary, no one (not even the reader) cares at all why this might be, and on top of that, the entirety of the 10 chapters are so nonsensical with no apparent motive to bring purpose to anything that occurs on a single one of the pages that make them up.

K. does seem to be weirdly and abruptly sexual with random women who he just happens to meet as strangers though, so maybe he was arrested for being a man slut.  Whatever the case, I'm not much interested in investigating any further than not at all.

For my next book, I'm going back to an author I could relate to a little better.